questions was chain heal on tank or mele ? but is how signergize ES and CH ?

When casting a chain heal on mele you have several strategies if you have not any low health mele with a RT HoT:

- 1) To cast it on a low health mele, your first jump will do very few overheal but unless your lucky enougth to have previously casted RT on it you won't benefit from ES and RT multiplicators

- 2) To cast it on the tank even if it is close to full life, because generally you have an ES and a RT on the tank and then benefit of a much stronger CH for the following targets. (considering tank is at mele range glyphed or not)

- 3) Cast RT on mele and then CH, at the cost of 2 GCD and at the risk your first target get healed before your CH reachs it.

I have a new question now, I have not tested if the bonus given to a shielded target is also given to the following targets of a chain heal, someone did that test ?

For those who have an opinion (but have not made the test) on that question, I remind that mastery doesn't double dip with chain heal, the values and targets are calculated when chain heal is casted, THEN each heal is improved by mastery for each targets depending of the life level.
I wonder if the benefit of a shielded first target might not suffer from the same restriction. Chain heal could be calculated first and then every shielded target gets a benefit.

My first questions was - Is scenario 1 better than scenario 2 in any case, (3 seems weaker) ? is there any breakpoints around those scenarios ?

every time I see a healer wondering about how to maximise their HPS, i have the same response: how and what you do in healing depends on your healer composition, your strategy and the situation. blindly trying to maximise your HPS is not the point in healing. unlike for DPS, the boss won't die faster if all healers pump out extra HPS.

the point of healing is triage. if a player is at low HP and in risk of dying, your first concern shouldn't be to get as big a CH on them as possible, but what heal would be best to save them, or at least stabilize them so they're not in immediate threat.

While I've yet to raid in MoP, I'm going to assume the same logic as always applies.

If you are trying to theory-craft how to maximise your meter position, you can. If what concerns you is who gets the heal on the target first, though, you're not in a position where being super-optimised matters, if your healer squad is competing to heal whoever takes damage first. Either it doesn't matter because no one else has taken damage and you have all the time in the world to let any one of these idle, competing healers heal it, or you have a bad healer squad who leave their assignment to pad the (In many senses) irrelevant Healing meter.

The question is valid. Progression bosses have hps requirements and minmaxing your output is what every healer should strive for. Of course there will be situations where blindly following a minmax strategy is wrong, but it is nonetheless important to know what the abstract optimal hps/hpm strategy is. That knowledge allows you, on conscious or unconscious level, to make better decisions in the heat of the battle.

I believe the ES bonus will not apply to subsequent jumps but have not tested it recently. The rule I generally follow is to always CH the lowest HP target. If my riptide is off CD I will use that first, but if I see a lot of incoming heals from other healers on that target, I will not follow it up with a CH on that target. Primary CH targets receives by far the biggest heal so trying to always CH on top of riptide is in my opinion flat out wrong. IOW, treat it as a nice bonus when the situation allows it but don't obsess over it.

Also keep in mind that Chain Heal is a pretty weak spell this expansion, and is more of a filler type spell that you use when you need to burst a lot of supplemental AoE healing or when you have extra mana to burn. In practice, it should rarely exceed 10% of your total output. Excessive use of Chain Heal is a mistake a lot of people make this expansion, and is one of the things that will OOM you/reduce your output faster than anything.

In general, if you are trying to min/max (and are obviously talking about a situation where maximum AOE output is your goal), all of the following should take priority over Chain Heal
1. Healing Rain/ULE on cooldown
2. Healing Stream Totem on cooldown
3. Riptide on cooldown
4. Greater Healing Wave or Healing Surge if it will be fully effective and hit at a low health target (strong mastery bonus)

Even when those things are on cooldown/don't apply, you may only want to use Chain Heal if you have excess mana to burn, because it will drain a lot of mana, and will potentially make it so that you can't maintain 1-3 throughout the fight. You may be better off in the view of sustained output for the entire fight spending the time using Healing Waves or casting Lightning Bolts with Telluric Currents glyphed than Chain Heal on 80%+ HP targets.

As far as Earth Shield, it doesn't change the fact that CH is only worth casting if it hits at minimum 3 targets. Too often tanks are too far from the melee or other players for CH to bounce. Because CH is such a relatively weak spell in terms of HPS/HPM and priority, I personally would avoid ever casting it if the target doesn't have Riptide on it. There is probably something better to cast than CH unless the conditions are ideal for it.

every time I see a healer wondering about how to maximise their HPS, i have the same response: how and what you do in healing depends on your healer composition, your strategy and the situation. blindly trying to maximise your HPS is not the point in healing. unlike for DPS, the boss won't die faster if all healers pump out extra HPS.

the point of healing is triage. if a player is at low HP and in risk of dying, your first concern shouldn't be to get as big a CH on them as possible, but what heal would be best to save them, or at least stabilize them so they're not in immediate threat.

Im surprised how many guilds do not think like this. I was applying to top 200 us guild this expansion on my shaman and one of the parses I linked showed a druid above me and he asked me about why a druid was above me(he thinks they are worst healers, i wouldnt disagree though lol, they are pretty weak), I responded with "Well for that fight we didnt need people at full health, so if they have hots on them there is no need to heal them to full and waste mana." He didnt like that response, laughed at me and said I could show myself out.

I have checked and NO the subsequent targets do not benefit from a ES on the first target.
ES works like mastery in fact, the healing received by ANY shaman is improved, nothing more.

My question seems less valid now.

To persons answering than HPS is not the important thing but triage is, I agree but in my exemple the triage was the same : heal mele with chain heal, I was just wondering what was giving the more HPS. The result would have be the same the lowest targets at mele would have been healed.

As gearscore improves, CH is getting better, it's still weaker than in WotLK of course.
Now, I am full epic geared, I see 100 k crits on the first target very frequently.